I am putting together a telephone directory, and I was trying to figure out a good way of getting section markers to work for me.

My setup has 3 towns: Burford, Paris and St George. Under each of those there are alphabetic listings, to which I would like to have a marker for each letter to denote the change of the letter in the listing. Ideally I would like the that has an object style. So it would have markers for A-Z under Burford, then A-Z under Paris.

When I change the numbering & section options, it just changes the page number. It seems from my reading that this should be possible, but I haven't found any examples of how to do this.

[Edit] I have added a photo of what I'm trying to achieve. As you can see I've got a page number, a variable to pull the town name along the page edge. I've added those manually, but the idea behind this question is to figure an automated way of creating markers like that.

2 Answers
2

Okay based on your updated question here is how we do it where I work. Someone else might have a better solution:

You're bringing this out from some sort of database presumable and going to be adjusting it in Excel and then importing it as a CSV file to InDesign. We sort stuff like this out in the Excel file so when we do the import it already has the category header (category, state, country, whatever that directory calls for) in place. If you set it up so it imports from Excel with the Paragraph styles already in place its then a simple matter of creating the triangle shape and dropping it behind the letters.

It was my understand though that he wasn't "lettering the pages" but wanting Company Name's starting with A for say 5 pages or whatever then names starting with B for say 4 pages. So it would be "Buford - A" - "Buford - B". Somehow detecting where the letter ends and starts within each metro (book section). I could be wrong though.
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Ryan♦Jan 14 '13 at 0:10

What I wanted was the section has the title "Burford". Then following that there would be 26 alphabetic markers, just "A", not "Burford - A". When I tried using that dialog it just changed the page numbers and not the markers I had created.
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jamEsJan 14 '13 at 1:16

I tried this method and it only changes the page number to letters which isn't what I'm trying to achieve. The markers need to be independent of the page count.
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jamEsJan 16 '13 at 0:57